Author of Book Series Sends Kids on a Web Treasure Hunt
By Motko Rich
Published: September 1, 2008

When Rick Riordan was recently researching the life of Benjamin Franklin for the first book in a new children’s fiction series about the most powerful family in the world, he came across an essay about flatulence written by the founding father better known for his experiments with electricity and awaking early.

“Come on, when you’re writing for kids, that’s just a must right there,” said Mr. Riordan during an interview at the New-York Historical Society, where he sat on a bench in front of a glass case full of busts of Franklin. “It’s an automatic connection. I had to put that in there.”
So far Mr. Riordan (pronounced RYE-r-don) is chiefly known as the author of the popular Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, about the adventures of a young boy who is half Greek god, half human. Now he has written “The Maze of Bones,” the first installment of “The 39 Clues,” a new series that Scholastic, the American publisher of the Harry Potter books, is releasing next Tuesday.

Calling upon his experience of 15 years as a middle school English and history teacher, Mr. Riordan sought to fill the book with details that would be educational but also ensnare the average preteen reader.

“My goal in the classroom was always to make sure they were having so much fun that they didn’t realize they were learning,” he said. “I saw ‘The 39 Clues’ as a potential vehicle for doing some education in a fun way — to take some of these amazing stories from history, dust them off and make them alive.”

The full story at the NYT online.